Saudade
by b-mystique
Summary: When he met her eyes he saw redemption in them. When he heard her voice he felt hope. The truth is Joss wasn't just a friend. She was his moral compass. She was his solace. And now she was gone and he does not quite know where that leaves him other than irrevocably broken.He's not much of a praying man, but he prays that for now, she's looking away. Post The Crossing. Slight Shaw.


_**A/N:**__ Hi. I've been a fan of POI since the pilot and I've read some of the great fics over here before, but I've never written anything for the fandom. As you can imagine, as a Taraji and Carter fan, last week's episode inspired me to take time out my schedule (so much going on in life I really shouldn't be typing anything. I feel guilty about it, but I'm pushing past that) and whip something up. I tend to free-style a bit…no rough drafts or planning and mapping out, so forgive me for that beforehand. Carter and Reese was one of my favorite relationships on the show. I'm not necessarily a shipper, but I'm drawn to really deep ambiguous bonds and they have, they had that. I, um, I'm sure that there are plenty of fics based on "The Crossing" and I'll surely read them when I get the time and I'm in the right mindset for it. I'm not an overtly emotional person, but that was a rough episode. I'm sorry, I'm rambling. I'll just get to it. The word Saudade came to mind when I was writing this piece, and the Bible Proverb at the end, it reminded me of Carter. :)_

_**Disclaimer:**__ I do not own Person of Interest or any of its wonderful characters. I'm only humbly borrowing. Un-betaed so errors are my own. Spoilers for "The Crossing". Reads and reviews are appreciated and welcomed. _

_~o~_

_Saudade: A Galician/Portuguese word with no immediate English translation. A deep emotional state of nostalgic longing and yearning for an absent someone that one loves. So indefinite as to be indescribable._

~O~O~O~

He crawled out of the bottle long enough to go to her funeral.

He was in the shadows of course. He was always in the shadows, lurking on the peripheral of her life… until he wasn't. He should have remained in the shadows. That was where he belonged. That was where he intended on staying until she wormed her way into his life so quickly, so effortlessly, so wholly that he hadn't realized just how deeply rooted she was until it was too late.

He watched them lower her into the ground from his position behind the tree. Fusco, still battered and bruised not hiding the tears cascading down his rotund cheeks. A woman with milk chocolate skin and eyes big and bright, just like hers nearly doubled over in anguish as she cried over the casket. Taylor tall and gangly, still not filling out the oversized suit that hung loosely on his frame, gripping Carter's mother so tightly he feared the woman might break. He assumed that the man beside Taylor was his father. He almost chuckled bitterly because it was the best kept secret of all that the man was still alive. He felt Taylor's gaze before he saw it. Glassy eyes glazed over with despair, pain, and anger met his and he nearly crumbled under the weight of the blame in them. Taylor had to blame him, because he blamed himself. It was his job to protect her afterall. An unspoken promise that he had with the boy the moment they met. He left before hearing the salute.

He sits at their coffee place. He sits in their booth. It crackles under his weight and he swears…he swears he can still smell her perfume in the air around him as if it were absorbed in the tabletop and windowsill, as if it was embedded in the cheap pleather or the walls. He places his mug down with a thud and stares at hers untouched, of course. It's as if he can still hear whispers of her laughter from the last time they were there. It's as if he can see her face smirking at him, her rolling her eyes, the way she'd brush her hair aside and stare out the window before meeting his gaze again and shaking her head. He rubs his face, dragging calloused hands over it so roughly he swears the scruff cuts through his palms. Not that it matters. Not that he really cares.

He hasn't been entirely alert but he feels the stealthy woman's presence seconds before she appears within his line of sight. Shaw has all the grace and calculated movement of a panther. She's all stealth and predatorily sleek. She stands beside the table strikingly imposing for someone so small in stature. All black from head to foot permanent scowl etched in her face. She waits for him to acknowledge her. He doesn't. She doesn't care. She slips into the booth across from him pausing briefly in front of the untouched coffee cup, Carter's cup, Carter's spot, before sliding further over towards the window upon observing and undoubtedly feeling the withering and deadly stare he shot in her direction.

She doesn't say anything for a long while and he's perfectly okay with the silence. Finch, Finch tries to talk and make assurances, and they're all words, empty words. He's angry at himself, but there is something that he's directing at Finch that is surely putting a wedge between them. He begins to wonder if he's cut out for this. He wonders if Finch has lost control of the very omniscient entity that he's created. He wonders if there was something that could have been done, and it isn't the first time that his faith in Finch and the Machine has wavered but it's the first time that it has cost him this gravely. It cost him too much. It cost him _everything_. His grip on his mug tightens suddenly and he can almost feel the strain of the ceramic beneath his fingers, threatening to break into shards and pieces just as he has done. He sets it down and clenches and unclenches his hands and when he glances down at them he swears he can see blood etched in the cracks of his palms and embedded beneath his fingernails. Her blood. Joss' blood, and her death replays like old scratchy film in his mind, and he can feel the weight of her body growing lifeless in his arms and the warmth slowly disappearing. His eyes want to water but he has no tears left and nothing left to cry for. He grits his teeth, clenching his jaw so tightly he can feel the ticking and pulsating in his temples.

"I see it now," Shaw says flatly.

He whips his head in her direction and sees her pressed up against the window, knee resting beneath her chin. She looks like a child. A deadly, lethal child. His killer blue eyes rest on her brown ones and he lets out a bitter bark of laughter that makes the person behind him flinch. He knows what she is referring too. He knows that for some time she had doubted his abilities and the reputation that he had developed. She didn't see him as the monster that he really was. She even so much as called him weak, dismissing him as if he were Finch's guard dog and hired monkey and not the barely contained deadly force that he truly is. He never thought much of it, as long as she did her job well and he had nothing to prove because he never anticipated slipping back into who he had become. He didn't need too…he had…he had _her_. He does not relinquish his gaze, crazed blue eyes boring into her seemingly indifferent and unfazed brown ones. If he had not come to know her and pick up on her micro-expressions however fleeting, few and far between they were, he would not have seen that she was a woman with a new purpose. She has the focus and determined hard edge that he had seen in her when she lost Cole.

He finds it an interesting turn of events.

The woman who professed to only have been there for dog has been displaying a sense of dedication and investment in their team that had suggested anything but. He knows that she had a respect for Carter and that for Shaw…that was probably the closest she'd have ever come to considering another female a friend. He narrows his eyes at her and she cants her head to the side and he knows right then that he won't be the only one going after Simmons. He had his suspicions, Fusco has been more angry than he is broken, Root's Machine ramblings and practicality lends itself to a dead POI, and he's even heard whispers in the streets about Elias the sentimental criminal king pin. It will not be a matter of if Simmons will die, and he has anything to do with it, and he will, Simmons will die. It's a matter of who will get to him first. There is a vengeance swimming in those dark eyes that mirror his own, and a slight sadistic gleam of someone preparing for a hunt. Shaw smirks slightly as if she knows that he sees it in her, and she nods as if she's finally recognizing that she may have underestimated him.

"She wasn't just your friend." She states it rather than asks about it again and he closes his eyes briefly as a sudden image of Car-of Joss smiling up at him flashes through his mind and he has to stave off a fresh wave of uncontrollable rage.

She was not just a friend. She was something that even he could not appropriately describe. There is no way he can tell a sociopath who is barely capable of making lasting connections or truly caring about more than a handful of people, what Joss was to him. The truth is Joss was his anchor. She was the one thing that grounded him. She was the light at the end of the tunnel that gave him something akin to hope. She was his light, bright and luminous and warm and he knew he could be a better person, a better man just as long as he basked in her light.

The truth is Joss gave him purpose. While he credits Finch for giving him a purpose by giving a job, it is entirely different from Joss. Joss gave him a personal purpose. He is…was inexplicable tethered to her the second he walked out of the police station the first time. He held himself accountable to Joss, for his actions, for his decisions…he could not make up for what he did in the past, but he could be held accountable to her in the present. She was an upholder of law and had a solid moral foundation and she was just inherently good in a way that he had aspired to be but never could obtain because it isn't entirely in his nature. She was good. She was a good soldier that got out scathed but untarnished, her sense of decency even stronger and withstanding all the hardships she faced during her service. It made her stronger than him and he admired that.

She was his moral compass.

When he met her eyes he saw redemption in them. When he heard her voice he felt hope. She was the mirror to which he reflected on himself. A mirror that was honest and kind, because she saw him as worthy. She saw worth in him as a man, not as a hero, and at a time when he no longer seen worth in himself. She deemed him worthy despite everything he had done in his life and who he used to be, and if she could see him as worth something than maybe, just maybe, he could live his life in a way that measured up to the worth she seen in him. If she seen him as worthy than maybe, one day, he could see himself as worthy too. The truth is she stopped him from eating a bullet by his own hand. She was the representation of those who had got out and ended up okay and while it was too late to aspire to be like her, he could at least try and make her proud, be worthy of her allegiance and her friendship.

The truth is Joss wasn't just a friend. He had somehow found hope, redemption, purpose, an anchor, solid ground…he had found _solace_ in a beautiful five foot four woman with eyes like liquid pools of chocolate and a heart that was brave and true. He had not allowed himself to feel close to anything or anyone for years and she wormed her way through unexpectedly and unassuming until she was entrenched so permanently within him that he had not a chance in hell of expelling her out. She was his solace.

And now she was gone and he does not quite know where that leaves him other than irrevocably broken.

She was more than just his friend, but he cannot fathom a word that would so aptly and accurately describe what she was to him. Friend doesn't quite encompass it nor does it do it justice.

He smells her scent plume up and it tickles his nose and caresses his cheek when Shaw shifts in the crackly booth across from him. He closes his eyes and he sees her face again, bright glassy eyes in pain and accomplishment staring up at him. She wills him to look after Taylor even though she already knows that he will. She's shuddering beneath him and blood is spilling out despite his desperately clutching her to hold it all in. He feels the prickling of tears that will never come because he's all cried out. He feels the weight of her body in his arms and the softness of her hair against his cheek and the smoothness of her skin beneath his fingertips. He sees her pleading with him to not let her death ruin him again…and he remembers crying even more because true to her life, her last request was so unconscionably, unquestionably, incomprehensibly selfless…and she's still looking out for him, as she had since the first day he met her. The first person in years to truly give a damn about him.

"_When your time is up, it's up…"_ her words whisper in his ear and he feels the ceramic beneath his murderous hands finally give. The mug shatters into pieces and shards that slice at his palms and blood speckles the tabletop but he cannot bring himself to care. He tosses a wad of money on the tabletop and he heads for the door, Joss' scent still lingering beneath his nose, he tenses when he feels Shaw on the heels of his feet. He wants to remind her that Simmons is his and his only, but he knows it will do no good.

He's never considered himself a particularly religious man. He's not sure if he believes in God but he knows unequivocally that he believes…he believes in her. He's always believed in her and it should make no difference that he believes in her in death as he did in life. His angel. His solace.

He will not contemplate suicide. He owes her too much. It would disgrace and tarnish her memory, it would break his promise. She saved his life in the beginning and gave her life for his in the end. He cannot and will not let her death be in vain. She died for him so he will live for her. He promised that he would look out for Taylor and he does not take that lightly either. He cannot entirely become who he used to be, because she has changed him, but he feels the familiar pull of darkness and though he carries her light within him, he's not sure if it will be enough. Promising that her death won't be his demise is the_ only _promise that he can make because it ruined him. It already ruined him, and he can't change that.

She's his angel now. He will avenge her but he's not sure if he's capable of truly honoring her. Not now. Not yet. He's too far gone. The anchor to which he was tethered too has been cut from him and the strings are waving aimlessly with no direction. He's not sure if there is anything there that can pull him back now.

He's not much of a praying man, but he prays that for now, she's looking away.

~O~

_"She is clothed in strength and dignity and she laughs without fear of the future."_ Proverbs 31:25


End file.
